Norwalk Funeral

A junkie wore a faded Hawaiian shirt, without censure, to the funeral; an inept but honest attempt at formal attire, everyone understood. He and a woman stood off to the side, with that tragic, impassive look the aging ones get. Their dessicated faces are rendered immobile; their mouths become narrow, grim, constricted in shame. But their eyes plead uncomprehendingly from their stony masks, as if there are children trapped inside, mute and powerless witness to their own self-destruction.

In a sense every junkie carries his childhood flash-frozen within, stunted and fossilized; of the dozen or so present that August day they were mostly children when they went in for the needle.
The first and only time someone attempted to recruit me for the death march I was about sixteen. He meant no harm. He was a cool guy.
"I wish I had veins like that," another once remarked about the same time, admiring my skinny arms; he seemed to think I was letting them go to waste. His own veins had collapsed long before in a spontaneous and futile attempt to save the body.

The hypodermic is a sort of bottle, and the user's nodding reverie resembles the untroubled sleep of the newborn. He is as dependent upon his surrealist-nightmare version of the baby's bottle, itself a mechanical approximation of the breast. But he is not nourished into autonomy; he is relieved of it. He has inverted the process, passing backward through stages of dependence into non-existence.

Death may be his final station, but it is incidental to his pursuit. The junkie is compulsively seeking out the pre-conscious state. He cannot return to the womb so he substitutes oblivion. Junkies have "committed to the process", like true artists. They are as devout as fanatics. They are the devotees of the religion of gratification, and have found the direct route to their god.

Despite his knack for creating it, the junkie hates chaos. The junkie has it all figured out; he knows what he will do with his life; he has a plan. He has eliminated uncertainty; his life will revolve around his habit, his love. What he wants is to escape the layers of personalty he has accumulated over time. He wants to eradicate himself to experience the consequent unburdening.
Junkies will accept their shame and failure; they will lament the pain associated with the life they've chosen; but they will never disparage the high. It's the most sublime state they've ever known, they readily and invariably say. I cannot trust these impressions too much. Only the junkie understands the junkie; a brotherhood like no other.
Someone once said a poem can only be conveyed by another poem; likewise the junkie's high. It can only be experienced, never understood.

Some may object to calling it love, but love it is, as deep and abiding as any. Her only moral failing was weakness. She was set-up at birth, by an absent father who's only lasting legacy was a propensity for addiction. A junkie picks the easy marks among the young as they grow into promise, like a pimp at a Greyhound station. The streets of Norwalk churned them out with similar regularity. But while the pimp exploits for money, the junkie exploits for companionship--the shared misery of their kind. The junkie community is a vampire's coven; one is initiated by blood into a state of alienation from humanity, neither dead nor alive.

The turnout was good; she was well-liked. The few remaining respectable adults of my old neighborhood, once giants to me, were old and stooped. The children were now middle-aged and weathered beyond their years. The children were distant and foreign.
The priest was reedy in voice and physiognomy. The service was offered as a charity, and the priest did not eulogize as much as proselytize; we were lectured like hobos waiting for a bowl of soup at a mission. The only way to truth is through the book, he said, holding his over-sized bible up in his trembling, scrawny arms; I worried he would drop it. He was in a losing competition with the vampire junkies for the souls of the weak.

When the priest asked for eulogists Howard came forward. Now about fifty, his speech came in slow, faltering streams. He was stooped and grey; he had lived in shortened junkie years for a long time. Leaning on his cane he drifted into one stuporous eddy after another, lamenting the death he had likely set in motion years before. I suspect it was he who introduced her to the needle; he was about thirty and she about sixteen. Weak and pathetic, he wasn't even a figure sufficient for focusing a hatred that I could not muster anyway.

A friend of hers rose and spoke movingly, then another, and I thanked God for the natural grace of women. But as if it wasn't enough to leave it at that, a young man rose to speak. He did not know her well and was not well liked by her. He suppressed a smile as he spoke. He was indulging in an opportunity to draw attention to himself, to parade before the young women in the crowd. He destroyed our small moment of dignified remembrance obliviously, and returned to his seat smiling.

Later I was working the crowd with nervous energy, in between the service and the burial, as if to speed up the humiliation of a graceless, cut-rate funeral, looking for something I was sure I would recognize if only someone would reveal it to me. I bore down on them one after another, thanking people for coming and shaking hands. Two of Howard's brothers were there, two more of a large family of mostly sons; former terrors of the neighborhood, they were fattened, shrunken, rounded out. Two little Mexican gargoyles.

I went over to the aging junkie pair. They eyed me warily as I approached. Later it occurred to me the possible source of their trepidation: they might have felt they were under suspicion for complicity in her death. We did not know yet if she overdosed, or if her heart failure was simply a consequence of her degraded health. I could not convince them that I did not care. They understood, as I only later realized, that they were complicit one way or another by virtue of their comradeship in arms. They didn't expect me to understand. They didn't know that I felt the greater shame. It probably did not occurr to them that I was the one who failed her in my absence; they, after all, befriended the sister I abandoned. But I know.

A Light Summer Draft

TERMS OF DISENGAGEMENT

"Nine one one. What is your emergency?"
"There's a man in the alley behind the, I don't know the name, the grocery store on the corner of Fifth and Pike."
"A man?"
"A dead man. I‘m calling to report a body."
"May I have your name please?"
"That's not important."
"I need your name sir."
"No you don't."
Are you certain he's dead?"
"He shot himself."
"Did you witness it?"
"Fifth and Pike."
“Are you there now?”
“Yes.”
"I need your name sir."
"I--I don‘t have one."
"You wish to remain anonymous?"
"Yes. I wish to be anonymous"
“Is this a hoax?”
“That too.”
"It's a crime to--"
"Yeah. A criminal, anonymous hoax. Everything."
"This is no joke--"
"I know. Forgive me. I didn‘t mean to--are you going to send someone?"
"I've dispatched the police already. Are you there now?“
“Yes.”
Will you wait for the police?"
"I‘ll be here. Apologize to the officers for me."
"Excuse me? Are you alright?”
“No, I’m not, I don‘t know, maybe--but God bless you. I’m sorry. Tell them I’m sorry. I don‘t know how else to do this.”
The sharp blast of the 9 millimeter and the muffled, porcelain crack of bone, followed an imperceptible moment later by the abbreviated slap of brain matter, membrane and skin pelting a graffiti tag on the wall behind the squatting man, the gun bouncing out of a lifeless hand as if fleeing its deed, clattering across the concrete ground; all of this, after transposition into radio waves that ricocheted off the alley walls and various objects along the way to a cel tower some two miles off, translated into and traveling in digital form along a cable for several miles more, before being released back into mere waves of sound, would register as little more than a harsh, static cough in the ear of the 911 operator. Flecks of blood, a few of thousands of such tiny globules that drifted about on the invisible turbulence created by the blast, mingling with the exhaust from the spent round, lit upon the telephone like the first indications of rain.
"Sir? Hello?"
The man's head rolled forward onto his chest as if he was drifting off to sleep, propped in place there by a distended jawbone partially separated from its skull by the force of the bullet pulling them apart in the split second of outward pressure between searing a burnt hole through soft gray matter and breaking through bone. His face buried into the tented material of his coat as if to discretely conceal the no longer human expression on his face, his mouth frozen and distorted into a warped, fun-house mirror yawn.
A homeless man, who had been hiding nearby, rushed to him.
"Oh my God! You okay mister? Can you hear me?" He said in a tone of false concern, looking up and down the alley as he did. He picked up the phone, listened for a moment, turned it off and pocketed it before gingerly searching the dead man for loot. Another man appeared, timidly making his way toward the car, watching the first.
"Hey!" The first man shouted at the second. "Call nine one one!" The man ignored him, moving toward the car. Watching this the first hurried his search of the dead man, pocketing his wallet.
"Get the hell out of there!" He turned on his smaller rival, chasing him off before giving the car a cursory search and hustling away.
A shard of skull detached from the wall and fell to the ground.

"...and I was just thinking, you know, I'll probably die never having one relationship like that, whether it's with a lover or a friend or, you know, even a family member. Anyone, really. So I just thought that maybe..."
He caught himself suddenly, but as a result of his screwed-up nerve impelling him on a blind charge forward he saw too late and reacted too slow to her look of trepidation. It was as if he had run several steps into a pit of quicksand before sinking. Terror manifested itself in a quickened pulse coursing through heated temples and a pit of the stomach sensation. He took flight, reversing himself clumsily and unconvincingly. "I mean, I don't really understand this, this need, to feel, I don't know, special or something."
She reached out to help him right his wobbling poise.
"No, me neither."
But her agreement was too deliberate and hasty to be convincing, and his transgression too obvious to allow them the contrivance. He was touched by the generosity of her sympathy, even as he reeled in the sudden embarrassment. He had ventured into territory she would not, could not enter; she did not share his feelings. They did the only decent thing left to them, withdrawing in mutual silence. Later he would return the kindness of her deliberate discretion, by not asking to accompany her home to make love.

For a time he thought they had been "progressing" toward a committed relationship, but now it was made suddenly clear to Michael that they were essential strangers, and that he was supposed to have understood. Of course he had understood; he was suddenly perplexed and somewhat terrified at the thought that he had known this, that they knew nothing significant about each other, yet he had forged on, willfully oblivious. He knew he should be glad to be rejected, but his vanity wouldn't allow him to see anything beyond the rejection. He resisted the urge to get up without a word and flee. For her part she felt precisely the same impulse, not from shame but from something just short of terror.

They now had reached a familiar juncture, revealing the resolution of a struggle of sorts by which they had sized each other up over a period of time and negotiated the terms of a not yet agreed upon contract. And, as always, this would not end in terms committing them to mutual domestication. It would not be spoken of, indeed it would be barely acknowledged in their minds privately, but it was clear.

The standard protocol dictated they needn't terminate their sexual relationship immediately. This merely heralded the onset of the curiosity of the sexual relationship with neither commitment nor the possibility of it; a relationship mimicking courtship but without end or purpose, without love or its prospect; companionship without fellow feeling and only the barest tenderness. As a romantic or domestic liaison, it was, above all, ironic. They would have what fashionable convention compelled them to treat as the most advanced and desirable state of affairs: mutual sexual availability free of any further encumbrance. A sort of intimacy there might be, the sort that must be qualified with the word "sexual"; but this meant only sexual familiarity, habit and convenience. Of course Michael may have precluded all of this with what he frantically worried was an unforgivable social blunder.

There were two possible routes before them: one of them would initiate, or maneuver the other to initiate if deemed necessary, the merciful striking down of the failed hope that was now in its terminal phase, or their quasi-state of engagement would simply fade out in stages, like two armed forces standing down in an orderly and guarded fashion. It was best that it should happen with as little pain and emotion as possible. Neither of them had perfected the thoroughly casual sexual relationship without prospect or want of it. He pretended to his friends that he could manage and desired such, if only women would cooperate, but secretly anguished at his closeted need for a sexual relationship contained within another based on mutual respect and that grander, more difficult vision of desire. He glumly looked on as his peers seemed to be engaged in an endless serial debauch of one night stands (of which he had, to his secret shame, not one to his credit) and group-sex engagements (an idea for which he held, to his secret shame, revulsion).

With a little luck in no time they would remember one another only vaguely, and rarely. Soon they would resume their life-careers as before this unexceptional detour, too short and unremarkable for those early expressions of passion and tenderness to rise to the level of remembrances. The virus of naïve optimism toward the next possibility lurked, like the beginning of a fever, in their minds. She was ready; he would have to sublimate the humiliation of this day. Each of them would eventually recalibrate the apparatus of their personal sexual existence, fine-tuning it for the requirements of another subject. They were young, for a while still.

Weeks before he thought that their relationship was proceeding, like a conspiracy against an indifferent and untrustworthy world. Today was nothing new for either of them, but for Michael the suddenness with which he came upon the terminus, and the circumstances of it, his transgression and its attendant shame and embarrassment, left him with a depressed, exhausted feeling. They kissed without tenderness or passion and dispatched to their cars to return to the mollifying familiarity of their respective homes and routines. He felt relieved despite the embarrassment, and he almost looked forward to the subsequent depression not yet fully upon him, as if anticipating a cleansing fever.
"Not getting any younger." He said without thinking, examining himself in his car's rear view mirror.

Jennifer got into her car, relieved to be enveloped in its personalized comfort, and alone. The beep from her cel phone alerted her to the fact that she had left it behind. When she saw that she had missed three calls from her brother's house her heart sank; she sat there for a moment with her eyes closed, before picking it up.
"Hello."
"Mark?"
"Jenny."
"Yeah." A moment's silenced elapsed.
"What is it, what's going on? Is everything okay?"
"No."
"Well, what is it?"
"Where are you?"
"I'm at the mall. By my work."
"You should be at home."
"Mark, just," her voice broke; she collected herself and continued, "just tell me."
"Dad's dead."
"What happened?"
"What happened? What's been happening for two years happened."
"Why didn't you tell me? I thought he was doing good." Her voice wavered.
"I told you he was getting worse last month. I called you last week. Jesus, Jenny, I don't have time for this shit."
"I should have been there."
"It didn't matter. He's been out of it for two days."
"Why didn't you call me?"
"Jenny, please. We didn't know it would be today. We thought we was going to go on for a while like--we were expecting you yesterday."
"I didn't--I had to--I'm coming over."
"No need for that."
"Where is he?"
"He's not here. He's at the mortuary. Julie's taking care of it."
"I'm coming over." She whispered hoarsely.
"Okay."
"Mark?"
"Yeah."
She paused.
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Alright."

Son and father were impossibly alike, unsentimental and laconic even through the father's terminal decline. It wasn't a matter of their not being close. In most aspects they had been much closer than most fathers and sons, working together in the family business for the son's entire adult life. They saw one another daily, attended to one another's needs, were intimately involved in one another's affairs large and small. But for Jennifer there seemed an appalling lack of sentiment between the two, as if each considered the other interchangeable. But her discomfort was the shock of self-recognition. Perhaps it was her feminine nature that allowed her uneasy awareness of it, her periodic attempts, feeble and stunted though they were to adapt it, but through the three of them ran the same stubborn emotional indolence.

At first she treated his illness as if it wasn't happening, a denial her father was glad to participate in. Through it all he resisted her rare and feeble attempts to address it. The old man refused to put much faith in the value, much less the necessity, of "closure", unapologetically jealous of his right to determine the circumstances, if he was to be powerless as to the timing, of his dying.

As his condition grew progressively worse she would return from each visit home a bit more desperate than the last, possessed of the conceit of having received an epiphany, and thus armed with the sort of turning-one's-life-about-in-a-moment resolve that one saw on screens or read in books. But within a day, or hours, it would fade into a vague and empty depression, which would quickly give way to nothing in particular.

She couldn't help being appalled at the dull stoicism with which her brother, his wife, and their father, went about the business of his dying, but as they were the ones immersed in it, and she was left free to go about her life, which she did gladly with only the faintest background hum of guilt, she had no basis to complain. It remained a frustration. She had wanted it all to unfold as a drama, progressing sensibly toward tearful resolution and, maybe, hopeful epilogue, but everyone busied with the dull particulars of it seemed oblivious to the finality of it, going about things with dull practicality, refusing to pretend they had any choice in the matter.

The last time she had seen him he was in a serene mood. Sometimes he almost seemed to take a perverse pleasure in it, as if his lifelong attitude of affected cynicism, that he brandished as a sort of defense against life's and mortality's omnipresent taunting, was now redeemed. She had always resented this pose.
"See you later." She had said, rising to leave. He smiled at her weakly, barely, with just a trace of the old glint in his faded eyes, and in that moment she allowed herself to assess full on the extent of physical decay she could somehow manage to avoid most of the time, even while sitting with him; his grey skin mottled and wrinkled, collapsing in at his trachea and cheeks; his downy few gray hairs left after the pointless suffering of chemotherapy, his eyes dulled and shaded behind the sagging folds of his eyebrows now adorned with only a few sparse hairs crinkled as if singed by a flame--one more minor indignity visited upon him by a taunting and cruel mortality. She suddenly felt ashamed of her own appearance, tanned, fit, well-dressed, standing over him. She leaned down and accepted his weak embrace, hiding her face, unable to speak.
"I miss you already." He lamented. There was no flesh left between the skin and the gaunt frame that did not shrink but remained like an archaeological artifact of the artifice of flesh deteriorating about it; she buried her face in the medicine-scented sheet.
"Dad, I'm so sorry."
"Sorry? Nothing to be sorry for." He gave a weak chuckle like rustling tinfoil. "When you were little I used to perch you up there on my shoulder like you were sitting on a bench. Remember that?"
"No."
"Too bad.”
"It's not fair." She managed.
"Fair is irrelevant." He laughed again. "I thought I'd at least have things figured out by this point. All I managed to figure out is that nothing is to be figured out in the end. You come in completely ignorant and you go out thoroughly confused. Do you remember the first time you saw a possum?"
"What?" She laughed at the absurd non sequiter of a question, lifting her head and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
"We were driving at night. You were ten or eleven. This great big, ugly possum was trotting down the sidewalk. I slowed down to point him out," he laughed and cleared his throat, mimicking a child's wonder, "what's is it, what is it? you said. You were disgusted by it, but totally delighted at the same time, to discover something so...so novel. This little monster running down the sidewalk. I don't know, it just sticks in my mind, you know; I was so charmed by your enthusiasm. I don't know. Sorry? Oh no. It's a privilege. What is it Dad?" His voice broke slightly as he tried to mimic youthful wonder. "A good memory."
"It's not enough." She said. He laughed again.
"Yeah, well, there is one thing I managed to learn. That 'enough' is bullshit."

A car horn interrupted her thoughts; someone after her parking spot. She waved to signal she would move along. She would keep moving. The sound of the radio filled the void left behing by her vanquished reverie; an afternoon disc jockey plying his trade in the standard tones of mocking contempt and taunting cynicism. He was ridiculing an actress who had been photographed in a compromising situation. A commercial came on, familiar shrill tones of crass enthusiasm, beckoning on behalf of a new casino:
"Why settle for less?"
A man walking past was watching her, meeting her eyes with a hopeful leer in search of reciprocity.

Out on the highway Michael was jockeying for position against a high end luxury car; it beat him to the pole position at the red light. He stewed on this indignity, magnified by the manifest superiority of the car to his, in this context nothing less than the driver's superiority to him, on full, humiliating display. He went through the numbers again, as he had countless times before, probing for some plausible way to afford that BMW he had become infatuated with. The wished-for car and its imaginary pursuit had become the repository in which he unloaded his increasingly desperate and fearful confusion. But at the moment, in his wounded state, there would be no distraction; a sort of panic was rising within him. The imperious car before him, the indecent affront of it; his ears felt warm. The light turned green, and for a while he angrily followed too close behind the detested stranger. Fantasies of running him off the road, pulling him out through the window and beating him in the street, of his giant fist crushing the car in its grip; finally this delirium broke in a sense of profound embarrassment. The car turned right into an alley; Michael watched it pass out of sight and pulled over to the side of the road. He laughed at the timely impinging of the radio:
"Why settle for less?"
The same phrase, culled by antenna from the invisible chaos of electromagnetic radiation that filled the air and transposed by a technology now quaint into mere waves of sound, conveying an approximation of a human voice approximating enthusiasm and searching out desperation, filled the confines of the high-end luxury car. The man at the wheel was in turmoil. On the seat next to him was a stack of legal documents, letters sent to and received from creditors, the history of the failure of his marriage transposed into legalese, the circumstances of the dissolution of his family and his attendant shame transformed into the cold, insect language of the law; there too were the terms, as inflexible and permanent as any natural limit, of his future relationship to his children, severely determined, limited under threat of legal consequence and monetized to the penny, the ultimate meaninglessness of biological fatherhood made unsentimentally plain and embarrassingly petty. There in that curiously unnatural and precise language lay the final sentence and circumstances of his emotional estrangement from his progeny, the awkwardness of visitation weekends and the long salvage operation of forced familiarity; there he saw the future bitterness to be reaped from an effort he had made in that most insufficient and sinful of all states, simple good faith.

There was the history of shame made public, of adultery and cuckoldry, of wanton disregard and casual cruelty, there in the personal declarations meticulously edited for maximum salaciousness and melodrama. There was the hand of the law, declaring he had been an insufficient husband--emotionally, financially, sexually--and therefore must be banished from the family, which would otherwise be kept intact--for the kids' sake--presumably until a more fit replacement for him could be found. This replacement had been found already, of course--his discovery was the precipitation of the dissolution. His wife had never relinquished the hope of trading up; to do so was considered a sin against self. She wasn't a bad person by any understanding. The man at the wheel could not square the justice of it all, however; at being displaced and dispatched, as if in punishment for his wife's transgressions--which of course were not transgressions at all, he would learn. The transgression was his: insufficence. The punishment was severe and final. This had been wordlessly explained to him by the various nodding blank stares he encountered along the treacherous way, as he railed against what he thought was a clear injustice, at a logical inconsistency that was nonetheless convention. It did not matter. He had only been guilty of naiveté, but he saw now this was the worst sin of all according to current custom, the lack of necessary diligence in self-preservation. And anyone who failed in self-preservation deserved his fate. It was all there in the paperwork.
He had no recourse, but those holding a claim on him, those he'd picked up along the way toward what he couldn't recognize now, did. The creditors would have to be satisfied, certain rights and claims of his own would have to be surrendered, the details worked out, or else. As for him, he would have to find a place to live.

The car pulled over suddenly. Barely having allowed it to come to a full stop, the man got out and walked away, leaving the car door open. A panhandler came upon him; the man turned to face him, holding out something in his hand, as if offering it. The panhandler stopped, holding his hands out before him before backing away. The man leaned against a wall, took a cel phone out of his pocket and put it to his ear.
"Nine one one. What is your emergency?"

The address she gave for our meeting turned out to be one of those pedestrian chain-restaurant/nightspots that perform the unsung service of keeping America's atomized middle class breeding, if barely.
I found it in an acid-yellow and dun colored building tucked into the armpit created by a loud and forbidding freeway on-ramp on one side and a hibernating bus terminal on the other. The building needed paint and a roof; its saucy name and logo, in dated script and design, once offered so confidently, was now mocked by its sagging, dowdy appearance. My faltering spirits stalled as I assessed the place. Arriving late, I sat in my car in the barren parking lot for ten minutes, staring at a faded American flag hanging lifeless and slack over the bus terminal's marginal squalor, not sure why I came and entertaining the notion of turning around. Regardless, it was too late; the agents had made me the moment I pulled up.

Once inside the nearly empty bar I immediately found her. Rather she found me; my attention settled on the darkened corner at the far end of the room as if drawn by a force there. Her eyes pierced the gloom like those of a she-wolf in moonlight, managing even at this distance to project her characteristic expression: intrusive, arrogant confidence. I took in a long breath, smiled, and approached.

"I didn't know they allowed smoking in bars here." I said, trying to affect nonchalance. I clumsily fell into the glossy vinyl booth, producing an embarrassing sort of noise. I made a show of settling into place by sliding my backside back and forth, but was unable to recreate the sound. Not a word from her and I was already at my characteristic, awkward disadvantage.

"They don't. You're late." She said, only then looking up at me, taking a long draw on her cigarette.
"I ran out of gas. Had to hike a mile with a jerry-can." I stammered. "Didn't even have enough to fill it." I mumbled, not really wanting her to hear.
"Sorry to hear that." She said unconvincingly.
She was made-up seductively, with rouge, eye-liner and, I suspected, false eyelashes. An aesthetic which is characterized in some all-male environments as CFM, which stands for "come f--- me." She was wearing a low-cut blouse and some sort of enhancing bra. She tilted her head defiantly as my eyes lingered; she had to check her hand, which reflexively rose to assume its typical thumb-and-forefinger cradle for her chin: the long practiced affectation of a "listening" posture. A slight lapse in her usual steel-girder control. Despite myself, I was charmed by this atypical vulnerability. She recovered and redirected her hand, reaching across and patting mine.
"I'll put this out if it bothers you."
"No, that's alright."
The transformation was jarring. Her style had previously been so studiously conservative that this was the first definitive confirmation I had that she actually possessed breasts. In my mind she was as inseparable from the pantsuit as Gandhi was from his loincloth and wire-rimmed glasses. The stray thought came to mind that the pantsuit serves the same purpose as Mao's Zhongshan suit: a uniform signifying a discrete aesthetic propounding a particular national identity.
"Is there a waitress in this place?" I said nervously, looking about. Then I noticed them, hopelessly out of place in their conservative suits and aviator-style sunglasses, one lingering near the door, scanning the room, the other attempting to use a potted plant for cover.
"Your detail isn't exactly blending in." I said. She smiled.
"Are you kidding? I don't want them to. If I don't keep them close by there's no telling what they'll get into. I could tell you some stories."
"Why do you keep them around then?"
"Window dressing, you know. They look imposing enough." She glanced over at one of them. "Most of the time that is. Somebody has to drive, run errands, clear out the occasional restaurant. You've heard the one about the Secret Service agent who locked his keys in his car?"
"No."
"Took him two hours to get the rest of his detail out."
I snorted dutifully. Over her shoulder I could see the television, showing a grim-faced newscaster with the Homeland Security terrorist threat graphic alongside. I didn't note the color-code level. A commercial came on that I knew well, a public service announcement warning against drunken driving. It proceeded through a series of state troopers accosting motorists, blinding them with flashlights, handcuffing one, guiding a drunk's head into a caged back-seat, finishing with a bull-necked, bow-tied trooper in a Smokey the Bear speaking sternly into the camera. I knew the grating voice-over nearly by heart; it played in my head as I watched, a growling, challenging man's voice, indistinguishable in tone and temper from that for a commercial for professional wrestling or a motocross exhibition, hectoring us over a shrill, arena rock style song.
"What have you been doing?"
"Not much really. Working a lot. Reading."
"Reading? I never took you for much of a reader." She reached across and gave my hand a quick squeeze, drawing hers away with a lingering caress. She laughed, as if abandoning a ruse. "Listen, D___, I know you're not some sort of virgin."
"No. But I may as well be at this point." I said, only realizing as I put my glass to my lips that it was empty. She smiled and, without looking away, raised her hand slightly. The waitress appeared instantly.
"I'll have scotch on rocks." I said.
"I'm sorry," the waitress looked fearfully at H____ as she spoke, "our ice machine is broken."
"Oh. Okay. Straight up then."
"Listen," she said, "those others can't do what I can do for you. They can't appreciate a decent, hard-working blue-collar man."
"I think you've mistaken me for somebody else." I said. "I'm not really in that demographic anymore. Rather it doesn't exist. It's out of fashion."
"Don't try to affect cynicism with me, D___, I know you."
"You know what? I think you actually do. But, that ship has sailed. There's nothing we can do for each other at this point. You'll go back to your world and I'll go back to mine. As it should be."
"Well, there might be something we can do for each other." She attempted to narrow her eyes seductively.
An Army recruiting spot came on; rangers hurtling out the back of a Chinook helicopter, rappelling down cliffs, technicians manning sophisticated machines. Someone changed the channel: a split screen, showing the two candidates for president, one in an uncomfortably close, fawning shot, his broad smile contorting the the thin skin over his skeletal features into painful looking folds, alternating with shots of hopping, giddy supporters waving signs and clapping wildly; the other an old man before a backdrop bearing the slogan and name of a lobbying institution, gesturing in a half-mechanical, half-narcotic fashion and speaking in a deliberately mild, sedated manner that contrasted with the mad look in his eyes.
"You ever get the impression that things are falling apart?" I said, surprising myself.
She gave me a knowing, empathetic look.
"You have no idea." She said, with the air of someone relieved of a long, losing struggle. "So, how about we get out of here? I've got nothing better to do. What about you?"
"No." I said, relenting. "I've got nothing at all."

The Last Republic, IV

Previously

Portrayed in the Media

Date: 10/31/08 14:00:00
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
October 31, 2008
Today, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the U.S. government has raised the threat level for all political headquarters, large public gatherings, government buildings and national monuments in the United States to ‘severe’ or Code Red, from ‘high’ or Code Orange. DHS is taking this extraordinary action in response to reliable intelligence indicating a series of attacks targeting the symbols and institutions of democracy ahead of the presidential election of Tuesday, November 4.
In separate communications the military, federal and state transportation authorities, hospitals, state police organizations, and other emergency personnel have been advised of specific requirements and recommendations. All municipal emergency and police authorities in the United States are advised to keep all personnel ready and on call.
DHS is directing all necessary precautions be immediately instituted for government installations and airports, including but not limited to increased security at all buildings, enhanced screening measures, and the establishment of security buffer zones around larger and more likely targeted buildings and gatherings. Political parties and organizations are advised to take the same precautions in coordination with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in any area in which they are headquartered or in which they plan on organizing public events.
Although the threat level is being raised for the reasons and potential targets listed above, all Americans, including those residing and traveling abroad, should remain aware and are encouraged to report any suspicious activity. DHS will continue to monitor and analyze threat information and update the public as the need arises.

*

When the Department of Homeland Security sounded the alarm late on a Friday the responding charges were immediate and widespread: the administration was desperately trying to derail an impending Democratic restoration combining the White House with a 60-vote Senate as well as deter an expeditious withdrawal from Iraq, abandoning that project finally to history's long list of failed adventures.

These accusations were enthusiastically met by the war's remaining unconditional supporters, as well represented in the media as ever. This remnant, smaller but purged by fire of the morally uncertain and the ideologically impure, had been selected for fervor and durability over the previous few years. They were battle-hardened, resentful at having endured a string of political defeats and much ridicule, and possessed the courage of the desperate. The threat and its attendant controversy were greeted as salvation and redemption both by these valiant survivors, and their glee was sometimes more difficult to mask than others. The prospect of terrorist violence was like the sudden awakening from a long political nightmare.

Within the day a prominent evangelical held forth publicly that God had deliberately intervened (but of course; stranger would have been the absence of at least one such proclamation; the Reverend‘s haste may have reflected his own awareness of this) just in time before the election of a Democratic president. That elite class of people deeply invested personally and professionally in the war’s continuation and the Republican Party’s fortunes, though as fundamentally irreligious (despite much contrary posturing from some of them) as their ideologically opposite peers, indeed treated it with a mystified zeal and conviction the religiously certain would have been ashamed to behold.

Using a familiar and dependable template, they characterized the administration’s critics as deranged by an irrational self loathing of America and, hence, themselves. Raising doubts about the "psychological well-being" (in a time when one might still hear now archaic phrases like "neurotic" and "phobic") of one's opponents was often more effective, and always much easier, in that morally confused time, than proving him wrong. Despite its popularity with those characterized as "conservatives", the tactic was borne of the same pop-psychology residual Fruedianism now associated with the era's Left.
But there was no sympathy for these psychologically afflicted. Some argued that if, God forbid, attacks came, the expressed skepticism of the administration's critics thereby passed into criminal treason.

Still, the keener among them were aware of the potential for utter disaster if in fact it was revealed as a ploy (the administration they defended they trusted little more than their enemies), and by Saturday morning most woke (those among them who had managed to sleep) with the resolve that they would play things circumspectly, hedging just a bit against the raucous fervor of their more common and less savvy compatriots, who were besides doing enough dirty work and heavy lifting for all.

The surest way to limit one’s access to the commanding heights of electronic expression was to question the morality of the nation‘s actions, no matter how warranted--it was never warranted. Television’s need to package political debate as a commercial product meant that style limited truth, reason and morality. Style took the place of religious piety. To operate on the quaint notion that truth and morality could and should carry the day was to render oneself illiterate in the language of television, and television, despite the revolutionary dissemination of information over the Internet, still determined the rules of political engagement. Perhaps it had always been this way, but arriving at the truth was never the point of public discourse; its purpose was to provide moral plausibility for national action deemed necessary by the ruling elite, and to provide the forum by which the individuals and factions of this elite competed for power. They did this primarily by cultivating and marshalling the forces of popular fear, resentment and greed.
Not simply material greed, which was merely one manifestation of something far greater. The elites who appeared, powdered, wigged, illuminated by artificial light, coached and practiced in salesmanship, on television nightly, carefully tended the public’s expectation, never explicitly stated but endlessly repeated, that might makes right.

Whether by design or not, the alarm swung the mood of the nation toward the hawks. The more mainstream and influential war supporters skillfully juxtaposed a posture of calm and reason against the hysterics of their own rabble and the sometimes sputtering outrage of their opponents.

Did those enlivened by the alarm recognize the absurd moral peril their personal ambition had delivered? Perhaps comfort was found in the rationalization that their ideal outcome was a foiled terrorist attack from which America emerged victorious, stronger and safer than ever. But it was inescapable, for any stopping long enough to reflect: the worst thing now, for them as a group and individually, would be if nothing happened.

Aside from opinion, televised reporting, to the extent that the two could still be distinguished, was mostly enthusiastic alarm. At Fox News (where, in a bumper promo, Bill O‘Reilly‘s oversized, disembodied head loomed over the digital ether like a hologram, lowering its chin and leveling a cocked eyebrow at us, lest we forget that “America must defeat these terrorists”, three times hourly for two days straight, at which point even the most thoroughly conditioned employees there were pleading for respite) a sort of triumphalism reigned. Status as a veteran of having reported the 9/11 attacks was held at a suddenly inflated premium, and was brandished and deferred to often in the heady atmosphere of the last weekend in October. Nostalgia for the emotion and excitement of 9/11 was as ubiquitous as it was unremarked upon. The Sunday talk shows basked in their heightened relevance and the regulars of the two minute interview worked overtime, broadcasting their competing themes as widely as possible. Outside of this tumult, as if there was no relationship between it and the world it fought over, the weekend passed quietly.

The election, which had been expected to produce a record high turnout, now was certain to set a record low. The pollsters were busy at work producing and analyzing data at one end, and the political class was anxiously analyzing it at the other, but operating over a weekend and with no time for the national mood to settle, the data was all but worthless. Regardless, the consensus was that the stifled turnout would benefit the Republican Party and the pro-war faction, throwing the Democrats‘ sixty-vote majority in the Senate into uncertainty and perhaps even putting the presidency back into play.
Thus it was a prominent Democrat who proposed the postponement of Tuesday’s elections. Unsurprisingly, Congress, meeting over the weekend in an extraordinary joint session, split mostly along partisan lines, with Republicans demanding the elections proceed. Several competing proposals emerged, varying from a resolution ordering the mobilization of the various states‘ National Guard units (hopelessly undermanned due to the war) to secure all polling places, to an unblushing offering from one Republican congressman suspending the election entirely until the threat level was lowered. Exhausted, America’s legislators went home Sunday evening having accomplished nothing.
On Monday morning U.S. stocks joined the world's markets in seeking refuge in the depths of devaluation; trading on the NASDAQ was suspended by noon.

On the ground, in the countryside, in the suburbs, in the cities and towns, the nation looked no different.

(to be continued)

The Last Republic III

previously

We Could Be Heroes

"God bless the Toyota Motor Company."
"What the hell did you say?"
"God bless the..."
"I heard you the first time, you traitorous scumbag. You don't belong in my Corps."
"You'll get no argument here."
Gunny Sanchez laughed and shook his head.
"Ericsen, If you weren't such a good mechanic I'd have already turned you over to the fucking hajjis. Keep up this insubordination and I just might anyway."
"No you won't."
"Oh yeah? Why the hell not? Jamison can take your job."
"Yeah, but then you'd be bored as hell, every last one of you."
The Gunny snorted.
"Admit it. You know it's true. You guys keep me around for my charm and wit." Ericsen had both hands engaged deep in the Humvee's engine compartment, and looked as if he was being drawn into it as he grinned over his shoulder at the Gunny, who had already resumed his normal countenance of weary, unsentimental determination.
"Anyway. D-Wight and Half-Baked are en route in the Haj-wagon from Alpha One. But we're still screwed; get that fucking bucket up by tonight's patrol or we'll find ourselves short basic evac capability. Air support is only going to get worse, so let's keep every option open. I don't want to turn this place into the Alamo if we don't have to."
"Well, I'm sure glad seats on the panic express aren't allotted by seniority." Ericsen said to himself as the Gunny passed out of the shade of the canopy into the unforgiving Afghan sun.

His hand slipped free of the wrench he'd been straining to turn against an inert bolt, slamming into the engine block. He resisted the urge to withdraw and sacrifice a position that would take a good two minutes and several unnatural contortions to resume, contenting himself with a low, angry growl and an attempt at an awkward kick to the vehicle's side, resulting in painful blow to his shin. He lowered his head and chuckled grimly.

"That's nice." He hissed through gritted teeth. As he turned his hand to admire the latest of what he had come to jokingly term "battlefield injuries", admiring the furrow of ruptured skin revealing a gash of white and red, an untimely, stinging drop of sweat from his nose landed neatly in the fresh wound. He chuckled grimly. Shoulda went to school, he thought; a familiar inward joke with which he salved his injured dignity at such moments. He took a little too much pride in the conceit that he was too smart for his station and occupation; this mollification was mortgaged however by the realization, which he intentionally left unexamined and vague, that being too smart for one's occupation is being too lazy for one's inclinations and abilities. And he was just smart enough to know that the vanity of the first only increased the sacrilege of the second.

But he was short, as in short of time remaining in his deployment, and shortness was everything. Shortness was the impending release from Limbo. Shortness was hope becoming manifest. The short-timer looked to the future and saw it smiling back. Shortness washed away sins. Being short was like rising from the depths of a self-imposed emotional slumber. This slumber was the drastic means necessary to endure such as a second tour with the possibility of extension.

The extension was the opposite of shortness; hope deflated, powerlessness revealed, dreams plunged into the murk of obscurity. These were typically handed down near the end of a deployment, as if to maximize the amount of time in which the sorry grunt is heartened by his impending return home and minimizing that period that he is resentful toward the "Suck" for taking it away. Not only did they cheat one out of three months away from home, they cheated him out of a certain fraction of survivability. This was lost on no one, particularly certain grieving families, when some unlucky serviceman fell during the period of his extension. Being extended is being put back in the lottery.

Servicemen counted their days in peacetime. Those who weren't careerists ("lifers"), relished becoming short-timers. But counting off time in a war zone changed the very nature of shortness; it had no real value until it was cashed in, and one couldn't help but become superstitious, sneaking up warily upon that moment of release. One was either deployed or not, there was no sense of cruising to a finish but the unease of getting past the wire, and until he was safely home the short-timers shortness was just and only that: hope, ephemeral, without form, and fragile.

He couldn't help himself, however; envisioning his return, striding through LAX wearing still dusty camouflage utilities, lean, tanned and handsome, maybe bearing a becoming scar; oblivious to the deferential gazes of passers-by (God help any one who presumes to "thank" him for his service, he thought, imagining himself overrun by such and dispatching them one by one--a right cross here, a kick to the groin there, an acrobatic flip hurling one of them into another, a la Robert Stack in the movie Airplane as he ran a gauntlet of Moonies and Hare Krishnas), and coming upon that same beautiful woman he'd seen there years before, when, as a "boot" fresh out of Basic Training, he hustled to board a plane for Camp Lejuene.

An aspiring actress (he imagined), in a sheer halter top over a body so perfect that it hurt him to look; it hurt him more when she returned his awestruck gaze with a little smile, guileless but knowing, understanding in a way he never could the nature of this longing, assessing it as she did from without, as its master. Because of that little smile she became seared in his memory. What power, he thought; she merely passed by and with the slightest acknowledgement of his existence she laid claim to a part of his consciousness. And she wouldn't have been able to pick him out of a line-up five minutes later. Still he did not feel embarassed or ashamed about any of it; no, he saw it as the most just and natural state of affairs in the world.

It was a thing generous beyond comprehension, a sublime kindness, this slight smile from a beautiful woman, and it cut him like no words, no circumstance, no honest self-examination could. With a masochistic, irresistible ecstasy he often revisited this image of the Aspiring Actress. Inaccessible as she was, effectively unreal as this stranger once glimpsed was, it was to her nonetheless that he would return. To this place where she existed, where she was given her due as an object, yes you feminist scolds he might think maliciously, object of beauty. To this home that somehow became mythical after a mere few months away in a foreign and hostile environment; to the land where the Aspiring Actress in the halter top ruled, as she should, over such as him.

He took pride in knowing that the Aspiring Actress was there at home being catered to and coddled, worshipped, while he was breaking knuckles out here in this abysmal place, protecting her from them. He would not yet allow himself to think of the war and thus his service as pointless, or worse, damaging; for now it could only be that the security and sublime obliviousness of the Aspiring Actress rested on his noble sacrifice. But the suspicion was there, and even now he vaguely sensed that it would only grow and mature into certainty. But such awareness could be deferred, when one is short; in his case it would be held in abeyance easily for fourteen days and a wake-up.
He smiled. If I can't have Her, maybe just a little breeze?

As if in response a whistling wind pierced the stagnant atmosphere. Ericsen stood there dully incomprehending for a moment, trying to place the sound as it gradually grew louder, as it approached. Even as the realization came upon him he did not move, and not merely because he knew it was already too close. He was frozen in the interminable moment preceding a sudden rupture in one's comfortable negotiation with reality; a moment which seemed to detach from time itself, boundlessly vast but offering no hiding place. A moment in which his life, previously stretched out and proceeding in an orderly fashion, one moment following the next, now seemed to collect, like a train running into a wall and upon itself.
Into that moment made bottomless by the certainty that it was, finally and abruptly, the last, was everything he'd ever experienced, things remembered and cherished and things long forgotten. There as well were things he hadn't experienced but somehow knew; alternate lives he had not lived. Every moment trivial and large was sucked back into some negative space, all at once, even the Aspiring Actress, smiling serenely. So this is it, he thought. Still, the question arose, still he had to ask; one last pro forma appeal, because it would have to be said one last time, the unsupportable assertion that he now realized his life, any life, depended upon, the assertion that if I am alive in this moment there's no reason I should perish in the next. And, as often is the case, the question took a form absurd for its momentousness:
Mortar?

"Where the fuck is that thing?" Lance Corporal Harold Baker was craning his scrawny neck out the window of the Toyota pickup with the makeshift camouflage paint job, commandeered months previously from an unlucky pair of would-be martyrs, with one hand on the steering wheel and one held up to shade the sun. In the passenger seat Corporal Damon Wight was watching him irritably.
"You're not supposed to see it, dumbass. Damn. Look how red your neck is. Get some sunblock on that shit."
Half-Baked pulled himself back inside the truck. "Sorry. We can't all have a perma-tan, my brotha. Before I came here I never would've imagined wishing I was black."
"Lying bitch. It's all you ever wished for."
"Do you know how fucked this is?"
"Yes." The word was forced out him by the bucking and yawing vehicle.
"Seriously. People could burn for this. I'm talking the CO on down. Fucking unarmored mini-pickup!"
"Secure area." Wight said, with a shortness intended to discourage the conversation.
"Don't make no difference. What the fuck does that mean anyway? Secure area! Bullshit!"
"Enough. We're halfway there, the bird's got our back."
"Yeah. Great. The drone is taking video. We're gonna end up on YouTube. We're gonna be in some fucking hajji video, getting beheaded while a bunch of camel-fuckers wail away." He attempted to ululate.
"Enough. We're a half a click out. Chill."
"Chill. Yeah."
They jostled along for a moment.
"I gotta piss." Wight said.
"What?"
"I gotta piss."
"We're a half a click out!"
"I gotta piss. This fucking road. Pull over."
"Hang it out the window, shit!"
"Just stop for a second."
"Open the door and face starboard."
"How in the fuck does that make us any safer than stopping for one minute? Me with my stuff hanging out the side of the truck?"
"I swear to God..." Baker slowed the truck, scanning the barren landscape about them more energetically now. "Hurry the fuck up."
Wight got out and stood, using the door as a shield, fumbling with his gear.
"Coulda done all that in the truck." Baker said.
"Fuck you." Wight called back over his shoulder.
Half-Baked pulled the truck forward.
"Whoa! Don't fuck around, bitch!" Wight shouted, watching Baker drive away slowly, looking back, smiling and waving. He found himself shuffling awkwardly in pursuit. The truck was about thirty yards off, Wight would eventually recall, when the bomb went off. But when he came to five minutes later he lay immobilized by shock, experiencing an almost peaceful sensation of having had all energy drained from him, and literally did not know where or even who he was. The blast had seemed to go right through the Toyota, making it look smaller and less real, not so much blowing apart as enveloping it, along with Half-Baked, a half a pallet of MREs and bottled water, a week's worth of mail and a manila envelope containing, among other things, orders extending by three months the deployment of one Lance Corporal Ericsen, Michael A. A wall of heat and pressure sent him, upright and airborne, gracefully bowed with his head and feet slightly trailing his midsection, holding himself comically, into a ditch fifteen feet away. He lay there for a period of time he could not gauge, coming around to the sounds of celebratory gunfire and shouts, approaching.

next

The Last Republic, II

previously

All in the Timing

America, distracted by the presidential campaign, at first barely noticed the nationwide strikes that took hold of Iraq in the middle of September 2008. The nation was entranced by accounts of Rudy Guiliani's personal and professional indiscretions and turning a collective glazed eye on barely distinguishable news features, promenading past single file and sometimes two abreast, about the Historic Nature of the Clinton/Obama ticket (and it would take until mid-August and a 16 percent poll advantage for the last "Is America Ready to Elect a Woman President?" article to hand-wring the precious final few drops of treacle from that particular theme).

For its part the television media was incapacitated by its four-year cyclical debauch of masturbatory political handicapping. Pundits didn't even maintain the ruse of addressing public interest or substance as they lovingly chronicled the minutiae of message and admiringly documented the most cynical ploys pitting one faction of the citizenry against another. Openly rendered quaint was the notion that political skill and cunning were unsavory or even necessary evils; they were now values unto themselves--the highest values, unsentimental favorites that produce results and create power itself. And to question power was a sucker's bet.

Politicians and those who hoped to influence or work for them understood this with the sort of clarity that transcends consciousness, and inspires a habitual reverence. Any literal discussion of it was vulgar and sacrilegious, but journalists, politicians, and activists now preached the evangel of Power in sermons infused with coded references to it; bipartisanship, moderation, unified government. While public opinion and sentiment were the crucial elements of the phenomenon, occasionally consuming individual political players like the forces of nature in a Darwinian struggle for primacy, the people as such were still, somehow, mostly irrelevant, treated as a nuisance with the potential for catastrophe. An unstable element to be contained, separated, and carefully handled. The political class as a whole preached the benefits of a united and therefore "effective" government, while working hard to unite it under their own particular faction while dividing the public for the purposes of ruling it and rendering it inert; angering it here, appeasing it there, humoring it always.

The analytics of electoral handicapping were not dampened but enlivened by the barely contested race and the sustained pummeling of the Republican ticket; the rout had the potential to be historic, epic; thus it held the punditry transfixed, and there was the sense that the outside world would simply have to hold still while it followed its course. Those who held a stake in the Republicans' fortunes were desperate; in the corridors of certain media emplacements there was hushed but open talk about suppressing information and fabricating narrative. The public, having with grateful relief accepted the narrative that Iraq was now safely past its third act resolution and closing in on the top of the hour commercial break, would not assent to being roused from its willful apathy by anything less than disaster. Obligingly, disaster came, like a superhuman villain risen from a false demise following the feigned climax of a horror film.

Until it had all but run its course, the final unraveling of the Iraq project would unfold "below the fold", in newspaper parlance. That was only literally true of the more respectable papers. On what was later deemed the turning point in the crisis, and thus the US adventure in Iraq, the second day of massive street protests coupled with a nationwide strike that included emergency personnel and police (though rogue elements did take advantage of the chaos to commit various minor atrocities under color of authority), as the situation deteriorated so that authorities in the Green Zone, with barely a fifth of Iraqi employees having shown up for work (and most of these seeking sanctuary for their families within the barricades, now manned by tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles), were compelled by the continual barrage of mortar rounds to declare a zone-wide security lock-down, as all this was happening USA Today, having led with news of the latest pop star's fatherless delivery (a healthy seven pound seven ounce girl), featured the story on page three. Meanwhile, a "New Iraq" was indeed being born, with considerably more pain than that felt by the heavily sedated celebrity, feet first and thrashing. Even so Fox News found it unnecessary to discretely pull the latest installment of their feature "Forging the Next Iraq", glorying in our success and triumphantly compiling a list of all those who were "wrong" about the war (prominent among them of course Barak Obama for inconsequentially expressing skepticism as an Illinois state senator, and Hillary Clinton for her criticisms of the Bush Administration's handling of the war, now being recast by Fox as brilliant and cagey strategizing, the best possible course in a situation made difficult by fierce resistance--from domestic opposition).

And yes, Iraq was, finally, united. The always precarious alliance between former insurgent Sunni groups and US forces had run its course, a casualty of its own success as the foreign element all but disappeared. In its absence the Sunnis, recognizing their most realistic hope was not to regain control of the nation as a whole but perhaps, over the long run, retain influence where their numbers allowed, reconciled themselves. Shi'ites, tired of the occupation and realizing accommodation with the Sunnis might be their best means of removing any pretense of its necessity, and that some sort of accord was ultimately required nonetheless, were reaching out in the sort of political reconciliation that had been so elusive since Saddam's ouster. Equilibrium had been reached between the sects through the now complete process of ethnic cleansing and separation; things had run their course. Thus the two sides seemed to turn to the American occupation and ask in unison, why? The struggle now was between the two main Shi'ite factions for dominance in the south.

Opposition to the statement of understanding of the previous year between Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and the United States, outlining a permanent US military presence in the country and now being offered as legislation, was nearly universal. Maliki, almost completely without allies within Iraq and thus utterly dependent on the US, attempted to enact the agreement by executive order following a walk-out of nearly half the Iraqi parliament. The opposition surprised him and the US by calling for nationwide strikes and protests until the United States agreed to the rapid withdrawal of all military forces. The Iraqi democratization project was coming along alright; Iraq had discovered organized civil disobedience.

Within the US government the movement was expected to pass, and the administration was busily working two alternate plans for preserving the occupation, one attempting to forge a compromise agreement with the Iraqi opposition, another attempting to revive, in some lessened form agreeable to Iraqis, the UN mandate set to expire at the end of the year. Both offensives were struggling, and the prospect of an occupation without even the gloss of legality, openly resisted by the Iraqi government and population both, suddenly seemed a realistic possibility. At home the Democrats scrambled, behind the scenes, to again adapt, having already once recast themselves as not so much opponents of the war but its eager, waiting saviours, standing by to place a serious and sober hand on the tiller. But, like everything else in the electoral season, it seemed this too would play to the Democrats' advantage with little need to do anything more than issue a statement here and there lamenting the dismal nation-subjugating skills of the Bush administration.

It was in the south, where a slow, grinding civil war between Muktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council's Badr Brigades had been steadily worsening, where the flash-point ignited.
With British forces long ago reduced to a small, symbolic presence at Basra's airport, beyond which they did not venture, it was up to an overworked and underappreciated brigade diverted from the Second Marines in al Anbar to keep open the highway to Kuwait by which the occupation was supplied. This was manged through an unpublicized agreement between the Marines and the two dominant Shi'ite factions, trading US acquiescence to their control over the region in exchange for safe passage for convoys. Smaller rogue elements were not party to the agreement, of course, but they were unable to challenge US forces at anything above the platoon level; basically they were reduced to highway banditry and the occasional pointless IED strike or mortar barrage. Skirmishes between the Mahdis and the Badrs had been kept small, both sides recognizing that any large engagement would provoke air strikes from US forces (as much to preserve the narrative of a pacified and peaceful Iraq as anything else). And it was air power, ultimately and only, that kept US forces in Iraq as the feared and despised, but even to their enemies useful and necessary, stabilizing force of last resort.

Yet the strikes and the sense that chaos was about to descend intensified the various power struggles, provoking desperation in all players, none of whom were willing to sit patiently trusting their opposites would not take advantage; in particular in the battle for oil-rich Basra. As if by some iron law of history no one quite knows how it started, but on September 15, with what attention there was focused on Baghdad's implosion, Basra finally erupted into all-out civil war, and a day that started with welcome calm ended with company sized, organized forces representing the two Shi'ite players squaring off over each other's power bases in the city's civil administration. The police station changed hands at least three times; at no point was the US command certain who held it; likewise the various ministry buildings. But it was the battle for Basra's refinery that alarmed Washington.

The brigadier general in charge of Basra's Marines would later retract his statement that he had been ordered directly by Washington to intervene and secure the refinery. Nonetheless, a hastily mobilized and under-force Marine unit descending on the refinery came under fire from both sides, and with an entire company effectively pinned down and in danger of being lost, air strikes were called in. The battling Iraqis were not dislodged, but a column of fleeing civilian refugees was incinerated in the mayhem, with an uncertain casualty count in the hundreds, mostly women and children. How they were mistaken for combatants was never satisfactorily explained, nor could it have been to the Arab and Muslim world, where spontaneous riots broke out. Another thing America had learned to take for granted was the patience of the Middle East; while the American public was being lulled into apathy Arab and Muslim resentment had only grown. The anger released by the debacle was so widespread and unifying that it took on an ecstatic air; the massacre at Basra instantly became Muslim lore in the narrative of struggle with the Christian West.

Massive street protests, some violent, took place throughout Europe, Russia, Asia and even at home in the United States. US embassies were under various states of siege throughout the world. The embassy in Venezuela was overrun, its personnel humiliatingly saved by Venezuelan security forces. The American public, angrily roused from its slumber, turned against the war with a sudden vengeance. Polls showed the public overwhelmingly favored immediate, unconditional withdrawal. The Republican presidential ticket took cover after offering confusing, contradictory proposals for "redeployment"; the Clinton campaign called for withdrawal; senators and representatives offered competing bills for accomplishing it. The nation was, quite simply, in full panic.

The diehard supporters of the war held their ground, having nowhere to go and nothing more to lose. Any disposed to recant and with a safe pathway to professional salvation thereby had done so by this point, and the remainder were committed to the idea that if Iraq was to fail now that "success had been proven possible" it would be the result of treachery and cowardice at home.
In various editorial forms they lamented the nation's wobbly knees; their reasons for staying in Iraq had now reduced down to simply that losing would be dishonorable. Lost within the minor swill of that confusing moment were the words of one prominent blogger (ironically described as a "dead-ender" by another), so it isn't known if he came to regret, much less answer for, his perverse lament: "I think what the US needs is to be hit again."

next

The Last Republic

The End's Beginning

In September 2008 the presidential ticket of Clinton/Obama held what was widely and justifiably seen as an insurmountable lead in the polls, holding firm at just under twenty percent since early August, over the hapless, foundering campaign of Huckabee/Guiliani. The Republican ticket was limited by the former Arkansas governor's inability to broaden his base beyond evangelicals and the Democrats' highly effective 527 campaign (of unacknowledged parentage) portraying the candidate as a free-spending big government liberal in Republican disguise as well as an illegal immigration amnesty enthusiast.

But far more deleterious to the Republican ticket was another stealth 527 campaign detailing an array of ethical controversies surrounding, and the libertine personal history of, the Republican vice presidential nominee. A concerted counter-effort by Fox News and conservative radio to characterize the assault as crass political maneuvering only served to draw attention to it, and the fact that its charges required little embellishment hamstrung their energetic efforts from the start; as well as drawing no small amount of ridicule and handing the gleeful Democrats the opportunity to contrast the Right's conspicuous outrage with their own "swift boat" maneuvers of 2004. Republican complaints about the disingenuous nature of the stealth-campaign and their opponents' refusal to either claim or denounce it gained little traction outside of the Beltway where it succeeded in its goal of damping the enthusiasm of fiscal and social conservatives alike.

The inclusion of Guiliani on the ticket was expected to imbue the campaign with a gloss of "moderation" on social issues and "strength" in foreign policy, but almost from the moment he accepted the offer ethical and personal scandals began emerging one after the other. It was clear the Democrats had held embarrassing information on the mayor in reserve until his placement on the ticket; damaging Guiliani in the eyes of his fellow Republicans was the suspicion that he had known but not disclosed what the Democrats had on him. Soon "America's Mayor" was being compared to Spiro Agnew without even assuming the office--and apparently with little chance of doing so. In a memorable comic detour, that comparison drew protests from the Agnew family. This embarrassment provided monologue material for a full week on the late night talk show circuit, and at least one memorable segment on The Daily Show, interviewing members of the Agnew clan. Cutting Guiliani from the ticket was being openly discussed, but the desperate option showed little promise, as virtually no one could be found who was both an acceptable candidate and willing to lash his own reputation to the doomed endeavor.

Still, the various concerned interests within the government bureaucracy, at the Pentagon, those involved in military procurement, and of course the pro-Israel lobby, watched it all with increasing reassurance, intrigued by the possibility of marrying their foreign policy to an administration with an ambitious domestic program, widely seen as "liberal", isolating obstructionist Democrats within their own party and leaving them with the prospect of opposing the same administration that was enacting long wished for programs--like national health care. The Republicans, for their part, would have nowhere to go but farther right; for the "military industrial complex" it would effectively be one-party government. The air of excitement in certain quarters of DC was palpable.

The Democratic campaign was doing everything it could, explicitly and incidentally, to encourage this, dutifully obeying polls that compelled unrelenting hostility to Iran, unquestioning allegiance to Israel, and a firm commitment to maintain the occupation in Iraq. The war in Iraq was now succeeding, having effectively divided that nation up into a collection of hostile but, for the moment at least, stable ethnic cantons; essentially, the presumptive incoming administration promised to maintain the drive to "victory", and contented itself by criticizing the many mistakes of the now widely ridiculed Bush Administration and promising a more capable effort. The names of respected, in the public eye if not professional community, former and current generals were bandied about; Powell, Clark, even General Petraus was all but openly cozying up to the Democrats, furthering Republican embarrassment.
Then, in the memorable words of a marine platoon leader that went unedited over the airwaves of CNN and instantly became a quotation-marked headline, the shit hit the fan.

next

Meanwhile, Back in the Bunker

In a darkened room, the President reclined on a couch, eating pork rinds, watching the 1997 film, Air Force One. A woman's voice translated an introduction being given by the President of Russia:

Tonight we are honored to have with us a man of remarkable courage, who, despite strong international criticism has chosen to join our fight against tyranny in forging a new world community. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the President of the United States of America...

The President followed along intently, with raised eyebrows. He started suddenly, lowered the volume and turned his attention to the door, listening closely. Satisfying himself, he cautiously returned his attention to the television, turning up the volume to hear Harrison Ford addressing a hall filled with rapt, worshipful Russians in evening wear:

What we did here was important. We finally pulled our heads out of the sand, we finally stood up to the brutality and said "We've had enough. Every time we ignore these atrocities--the rapes, the death squads, the genocides--every time we negotiate with these, these thugs to keep them out of our country and away from our families, every time we do this we legitimize terror. Terror is not a legitimate system of government. And to those who commit the atrocities I say...

The President sat up and started reciting dialogue in sync with Ford:

...we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer negotiate, and we will no longer be afraid. It's your turn to be afraid."
(thunderous applause)

***

How long you been in the Service, Jones?" The older man asked without looking up from the file on the desk he was pretending to read.
"About six months, sir."
He glanced up, a weak approximation of a warm grin barely surfacing briefly before being subsumed by his world-weary, default countenance; at this his gaze too sagged back down toward the document on his desk, directing his graying, crew-cut widow's peak at the younger man, as if addressing him with it.
"Six months out of the Academy? And before that?"
"It's right in front of you sir, American University."
At this he sat up and turned his head slightly, as if to hear more clearly, affecting an expression of surprise.
"Right in front of me? Gee, thanks for pointing that out."
"Excuse me sir, I didn't mean to--"
"You're right in front of me, Jones. Are you suggesting the file is a better authority on you than you are? Would you prefer I pretend you're not in the room? Or is it just that my questions bother you?"
"Forgive me, I wasn't trying to--"
"How gracious of you. May I conduct the interview for a while? That's if it's okay with you, I mean."
As quickly as his apparent anger rose it receded. He put his hand up to deflect Jones' apologies.
"Relax, kid. And get used to it, because you can expect to get messed with a lot more than that if you're going to last in here. You're not thin-skinned, are you, Jones?"
"No sir, not at all."
"Good. Now, listen close, because this is the best advice you'll ever get, American University class of oh eight. Forget everything you learned at school. The faster the better. And about half of what they taught you at the Academy. You'll find out soon enough which half. You're in the real world now, and it bears no resemblance to the collective imagination of the civilians back at American."
"With all due respect sir, I--"
"Unless you want to start your tour here as Rove's manservant you'll shut up and listen, son. Oh yeah, that's a real assignment, and believe me, that description is wildly euphemistic.
"You need to brace yourself, Jones, for the sudden immersion in reality you're about to experience. Things work a little differently than you were taught. You take offense at my characterization of your Alma Mater, do you? Well I'm just sorry as hell about that, but I don't have the option of humoring you, son. No, it's out of the fantasy world and into the bughouse for you, Jones. Because that's what this is. This is an asylum run by its inmates, and you're not one of them. Your job is largely to avoid becoming one of them. It also happens to be in your own best interests to avoid becoming one of them."

He stopped, sighed, and collected himself; he had said too much.
"Excuse me. I'm being facetious. I want to ease you into things, smooth your transition as much as possible. We're going to move you around a bit before we give you an area of responsibility--should we decide to give you an area of responsibility. We have various assignments here, some better than others, but we still have only one purpose, only one true assignment, the security of everybody within the bunker. Now, as simple as that sounds, what it entails will differ from what you expect."
"Sir, I was under the impression that we weren't to use that term. Bunker, I mean."
The older man stared blankly for an uncomfortably long time before his look softened into something resembling sympathy.
"You're absolutely right." He took a deep breath and continued, as if from rote: "You are to refer to our environs as the the 'Provisional Wing', as in provisional wing of the White House. 'The Compound' is an acceptable shorthand that we in the Service use here in the, here in the Compound; but you are to treat this place as the White House, the residence and office of the President of the United States of America. Because that's what it is. You work for the White House Security Detail.

"Now this is important. Under no circumstances are you to refer to the illegally elected faction currently masquerading as the legitimate executive branch of the U.S. government. They are in traitorous and illegal defiance of the President's National Security Directive in response to the terrorist attacks of 12-08 establishing a state of emergency and suspending elections. In the unlikely event that you cannot avoid referring to it, it is to be described as 'The Occupation Force,' or 'The Terrorist Front.' You'll hear and see things that, well, just always remember: you work for the lawful executive branch of the U.S. government. No matter what anyone says, inside or outside of the Compound."
He closed the file before him and leaned back in his chair, looking wistfully at a picture on his desk. There was a note of sorrow and empathy in what he said next, standing and extending his hand to the younger man.
"Welcome aboard, Jones."

***

In a small room two men sat before a bank of television monitors wearing military haircuts and bored expressions.
"Mortimer Snerd moving in sector three." One of them said, perking up. The other turned his attention to a monitor showing a hallway lined with portraits. The President is carefully closing a door behind him at the other end. He is wearing pajamas with "43" embossed on the breast. His pants are tucked into a pair of cowboy boots. He advanced upon the monitor view and stopped, looking directly at the camera. He stared for a moment, a pleading look on his face.
"Oh no. Come on, don't do it." The second man said.
"Sorry Michaels. We got us a seance." The first said, chuckling softly.
"Yo Gip." The President said, with weary familiarity. "How's it hanging?" At this he let out his characteristic snicker, his upper body heaving stiffly along with his nasal exhalations. "How's it hanging. That's a good one. I didn't even mean to say that."
He suddenly turned serious.
"Gipper, Gipper I don't know what to do."

"Screw this, Lorkavic, I'm going out there." Michaels said.
"No you're not. What are you going to say? 'Excuse me, Mr. President, but I feel it's my duty to inform you that you've gone batshit crazy and we only pretend that you run things.' "
"No, but I can interrupt him, discretely. We can't just sit here and watch."
"We can't? It happens to be our job. How do you think you're going to help anything anyway? Let him have his fun."
"It's your fun I have a problem with. This isn't right. I'm going out there."
Lorkavic watched him leave and leaned forward, pressing a button on the console in front of him. "Yes, George?" He said, impersonating Ronald Reagan's voice.
The President looked up, more pleased than surprised.
"Gipper?"
"You're doing great, Forty Three. Just listen to Dick. He won't let you down."
"I know, Gip, it's just that, well, I get the feeling..."
"Yes, George?"
"No one is taking me seriously anymore. I think they hate me. I get the feeling everyone is just humoring me, and I don't know what to do about it."
"Nonsense. They don't want to trouble you with the small stuff, that's all. You need to save your energy for making the big decisions. Because you're the guy who makes the tough calls. That's who you are, George, not some intellectual wussy who fusses over details and frets over phony moral implications. You're the guy who pulls the trigger. You're the Decider, and don't you forget it. You know what they don't. They think it's what you decide that matters, but you know it's sticking to your decisions without wavering, that's what's important. You understand, George. You know, Winston and I were talking about you the other day."
"Really?"
"Yeah. And Marilyn."
"Marilyn?"
"Marilyn Monroe. She's great. She's a fan. Can't stop talking about you in that flight suit."
"Thanks, Forty One."
"Actually, it's Forty, George."
"No, it's Forty One. Do the math." Casual, oblivious arrogance returned to his manner, as if his moment of self pity had never occurred.
"My bad. Right again, George. As always."
At the sound of the door opening, Lorkavic let go of the speaker button.
"Friggin' boy scout." He muttered under his breath, and then over his shoulder he tossed out: "Change your mind?" There was no response. At first he attributed the sudden drop in temperature to the opened door letting in colder air from outside, but now realized the change was too sudden and severe. The icy, clawlike hand that laid hold of his shoulder confirmed it, sending a psychic chill up his spine to accompany the physical.
"It's alright. Don't get up. In fact, don't turn around." Despite the hand on the agent's shoulder, the Vice President's voice sounded as if it was coming from the doorway across the room. "Having fun?"
"Uh, no sir, I, I can explain."
"Better you don't, Agent Lorkavic." The Vice President exhaled, enveloping the terrified agent in a mass of chilled air.

The President was still talking to the portrait, making idle, self-absorbed small-talk:
"...and this damn stress boil is flaring up again, same one that popped up after 9/11..."

"No need to explain. It's alright. Actually, I think this is a great opportunity for you. Has the President engaged in this particular behavior before?"
"Yes, a couple of times. Twice."

"...so I've got the workout facilities, but they won't let me take my bike outside..."

"Well, the next time it happens, you are to notify me immediately--before you take it upon yourself to join in the conversation. No more improv for you; you'll be working from a script from now on. In the meantime, we're going to need to do something with your impersonation. It needs work. Also, I'm putting you in charge of all video monitoring. You'll be reporting directly to me from now on. And I want you here all the time. Drag a cot in here if you have to. If you manage not to screw this up, you just might end up running my security detail once we're back above ground. Does anyone else know about this?"
"Yes sir, Agent Michaels."
"Anyone else?"
"No sir."
"He won't be back. You'll be working this detail by yourself for the time being. Carry on."
The hand withdrew, silently, sliding off of his shoulder like a snake, the door opening and closing behind the Vice President an impossibly short interval after. Lorkavic sat frozen for a moment before breaking the unnatural silence that had descended, with a barely audible squeak:
"Thank you, sir."

to be continued

previously posted at Untethered

Final Entrance 3

Begin
Previously (2)

December 11, 2017

FINAL ENTRANCE, INC.

CONFIDENTIAL CANDIDATE PROSPECTUS

LETTER OF INTENT AND PURPOSE
PROSPECT: "EUROPA"
BEGIN:

The question why is asked, and I realize for the first time. The effect of this, collecting the thoughts and outlining more clearly where this course I've chosen leads, has been to reinforce my conviction.

Confident in our mutual assurances of complete confidentiality, allow me to dispense with unnecessary pretense. You have established certain guidelines and follow them with admirable diligence. These guidelines are intended to demonstrate responsibility and themselves become law, granting finally the full sanction of the State to your (and I hope soon to be our) enterprise. Some wonder why you care, unhindered as you are already. But I understand that you have no choice in the matter, that to stand still is to, excuse the expression, die. That's the ironic thing about the expansion of freedom, we are bound to follow wherever it leads.

Your success in wresting from the State and society that last claim on the autonomy of the individual seems only a matter of time. And yet most of us, even those engaged on either side of the political debate, have no idea not only of the import, but of the very nature of what we are about to do. History has to proceed in this fashion, its moments blundered upon by the oblivious.
But to our more immediate concern. As you know I'm not terminally ill; neither am I seeking to escape mere unhappiness. Am I the first to find ironic this prohibition, considering we arrived at this point by a long progression of deferrals to the individual pursuit of happiness? But we are precisely where it was determined we would be, when we made that supremely subjective pursuit--happiness, a right. Curious is the course of humanity.

Making happiness a birthright was our forefathers' unintentional masterstroke. The pursuit of happiness, something utterly subjective and therefore not truly real, has defined us from the moment we enshrined it in law, though we still do not understand this. How were we to know that happiness does not really exist?

The founders could not foresee the eventual obsolescense of common authority vested in a people or its institutions. They took for granted the continuance of religion, government, society itself. But we are freed of these, whether we like, or know. All that remains is the corporation, the state, and amusements. Glorious, endlessly varied, lurid amusements. Forgive me, I've gotten carried away. Back to my more particular reasons.

As a young man I chose to remain childless. My reasons were unabashedly selfish; unabashedly because I, like most of my peers in youth, took my selfishness as a virtue. Doing something entirely to please one's own opinions is now seen as the highest calling; in fact the only opinion one is expected to cultivate and cherish is his opinion of himself. Disdaining the opinions of others, of "society" (as if that still exists), are now considered the behavior, the very base, of the fully realized ("actualized" is a word I recall hearing once or twice) individual. Needless to say, succeding generations have embraced these attractive and convenient values enthusiastically, and will not lessen their grip.

But then something unexpected happened. I grew old. Something curious happens to a man who has surrendered this elemental right to progeny. He can still feel a sense of humanity, as keenly as ever, even duty to the future, but he has lost any personal connection to the enterprise, the enterprise of humanity itself. He cannot see it as such. He is disconnected, and no matter how much will he exerts, he cannot reconnect, because there is no pathway for it. He cannot concoct, through mere force of will, the familial relationship. He thought his particular physical connection to the stream of humanity was merely a function of ego, and he was right; except "merely a function of ego" has proven to be a very powerful and necessary function indeed. Needless to say, I am one such man.

Deciding my line was no better or worse than any other, utterly interchangable and indistinguishable, I made the deliberate decision to end my line. Even though my reasons were openly selfish, I thought the act noble, sacrificial; standing down so that others may have more room. At the time I had no idea that what seemed like the ultimate act of liberation, detaching myself from the messy scrum of humanity's progress, was in fact an act binding me utterly and in perpetuity to irrelevance and separation.

Two powerful ideas, each unassailable on moral or logical grounds, one by virtue of being the most sublime assertion, the other so mundane and obviously practical, combined with the ascension of happiness as a right to drastically alter our relationship with life. One was the idea that no single individual or family is any better than another; the other was the economic practice of meticulously calculating the productivity, positive or negative, of all human activity; recognizing each additional addition or subtraction of wealth added to or took from the welfare of society as a whole. Before long, every individual human action will have to pass through this test. How, after all, recognizing the deleterious effects of a lack of productivity--the wasted potential of opportunity costs--can one justify his sloth?

Without realizing it, in choosing to disconnect from humanity's propagation, I had come to adopt the attitude formerly reserved for the aristocracy--the idea of noble leisure. There was--there still is for me--no inherent nobility in work. Effort itself is inherently demeaning. But as youth passes, passion fades, care itself becomes impossible--what then remains?

(...)

Final Entrance 2

Previous installment

2.

With hindsight, the era in which the now quaint internet program Final Entrance was born seems a time of ignorance, superstition and wildly illogical and unnecessary prohibitions. Much of the revulsion toward "suicide" and its cultural use stemmed from primitive religious belief in a "human soul."
Contrary to the enlightened values of the present, the superstitious belief in a ghostly, eternal form of existence peculiar to humans, was originally conceived as a sort of liberation from the tyranny of man and nature. In the early part of the twenty-first century, one could still hear in public discourse now satirical-sounding phrases like "sanctity of human life", and "human dignity." Thus, the odd notion that an individual taking his own life was engaged in something like murder really, for taking human life at all.

The word "prohibition" did not carry the same negative connotation as today, as an act of repression whether petty or large, but could still be viewed as a necessary restriction of "rights" (another word carrying a very different meaning at the time) as often as not. In this context we use the language in the broad sense of eighty years ago, when the mere existence of something as mundane as Final Entrance was enough to cause considerable controversy.
Indeed, the prohibitions extended to a great many things we find either outrageous or curious, such as public sex, polygamous marriage, drug use, "infidelity" (see monogamous sexual relationship), etc. To get an idea how near an unrecognizable past that time was, there remained the distinction between pornographic and non-pornographic culture. Sexual bartering of the sort that is now considered, literally, child's play, was still illegal. Prostitution was not a subject of commercial law and entertainment news, but a crime.

So it strikes one as further perplexing that the initial reaction to suppress this modest, seminal instance of expressive euthanasia came from "liberal" factions. Of course, this is yet another word that has evolved over time; in the year 2020 even the most "liberal" mainstream political figure dared not suggest apportionment of electoral representation ethnically, even on the most modest scale, and retrograde, quaintly delusional notions of "merit" and "fairness" were allowed to trump ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation in matters of employment, housing, legal representation, political power, taxation, and more.

(...)

Next installment.